To me it seems like this would be similar to trying to learn to read Chinese with absolutely no access to any educational materials/teachers.
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Ancient languages are (almost always) related to modern languages. So it can be like trying to read Italian when you have a Spanish dictionary (of course this is simplified). The difficulty comes in when it’s written in a script you don’t know, but even here, you can use this idea of ‘comparing to related systems’. Ancient scripts are often related to scripts used for other languages. As an example, (variants of) cuneiform were used to write Sumerian, Akkadian and Hittite (among others), and all these three were very different languages! But, if you know how to read one of the languages, you have a good idea what sounds the symbols could represent when they’re used to write one of the other languages. Sometimes there are also keys where we get a name of a famous king written in multiple languages – this is great because if we know how this name is pronounced, we immediately know a lot about the pronunciation of the symbols in each of the languages.
None of this is simple – we only have fragmentary evidence of many languages, and scripts can be devilishly complicated – for instance, Hittite used a system where each cuneiform symbol represented a single syllable. But there were several symbols representing the same syllable, and also sometimes they would use a symbol as a ‘loan’ from Akkadian or Sumerian, and it’d represent a complete word. Not to mention the fact that these languages changed over time – if you compare a text from 1600 BCe to one from 1200 BCe, they don’t write things the same, just like it’s hard for you to read books written in 1700.
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